Review: Francesco Marras – It’s Me!

Hell Tour Productions (September 15th, 2022)

Reviewer: Dan Mann

I was hoping to get this review online before this, but alas dear reader life & events etc got in the way, one of which was actually photographing Francesco at Stonedead Festival!

For those of you unfamiliar with Francesco Marras, he hails form Sardinia and for the last two years has been guitarist for Tygers Of Pan Tang (hence photographing him). Aside from releasing two instrumental albums ‘Black Sheep‘ (2011) and ‘Time Flies‘ (2018) he has been involved as a session musician for a who’s who of hard rock and melodic rock artists and bands such as David Readman, Bonfire, Toby Hitchcock and Terry Brock and together with Alessandro Del Vecchio he composed songs for the Resurrection Kings albums.

And so to Francesco’s new album ‘It’s Me!‘. It has Francesco on vocals, guitars, bass, banjo and drums programming (apart from ‘Take My Hand‘ which has Bodo Schopf drumming), Marco “Lord” Cossu on hammond organ and piano and Marco Garrucciu supplying backing vocals and Emanuele Martinez‘s violin playing on ‘Closer To The Edge‘.

‘It’s Me!‘ is an album for classic hard rock lovers, you can hear the influences of the likes of Rainbow, Uriah Heep and Deep Purple etc. There are big similarities to the Carsten Lizard-Schulz Syndicate’s fantastic ‘The Day The Earth Stopped Turning’, although Francesco cannot match Carston’s vocals.

Yes you could just say that the album is full of clichés, but that’s doing ‘It’s Me!‘ a disservice. Well that’s my humble opinion, the fact that I’ve listened to this album a hell of a lot since the promo email arrived kind of speaks volumes.

Yes there are ‘issues’ or rather weakness’s with the album, Francesco’s vocals aren’t the greatest, but he certainly has a fair crack of the whip, and some of the songs are a bit samey, but overall it’s a honest salute to all those bands a lot of us grew up with.